Why Check indexed pages?
Unless a page is indexed, it is not going to appear in any search results. If you are not seeing any traffic from the search engines, it could be because indexing of your site is poor.
Checking indexed pages regularly can alert you of any issues - you should know roughly how many pages are on your site, so ideally the number of indexed pages should match this. If you have a 1000 page site with only 10 indexed pages, then there is obviously a problem somewhere.
How to Check indexed pages
On Google, Yahoo and MSN
enter the following query site:example.com
This will show a list of all pages that are indexed.
A tool I highly recommend for automating this is the SearchStatus extension for Firefox. This is free, and available from Quirk
What to look for
When looking at indexing of your site, here are a few things to look for
- Are all the pages on the site indexed? Newly updated pages can take a few days / weeks to get indexed.
- Are the titles / snippets unique on each page? They should be.
- Are there session IDs or other variables in the indexed URLs?
- Are there any pages indexed that have since been moved? If so, setup 301 redirects for these.
- Does the listing for the homepage look good?
Generally, in the indexed pages results, the snippet will be based on the Meta Description (if there is one), or the first text content on the page. In a real search result, the snippet will be tailored to match the search phrase that the user enters. Meta Descriptions are worth doing though, so do go to the trouble of writing a unique Meta Description for each page to improve your snippets.
